Cue the Shrieking Girls for the Band of Their Moment

WANTAGH, N.Y. — Even though the new Jonas Brothers album, “A Little Bit Longer” (Hollywood), won’t be in stores until Tuesday, several of the new songs have been floating around on the Web in the form of bootlegs of live performances. They are more than adequate substitutes. With typhoon-intensity shrieks obscuring large parts of the songs — early Yoko Ono records come to mind — these bootlegs may be the definitive versions.

There is little point in listening to the Jonas Brothers independent of a horde of preteenage girls, like the ones who made up most of the crowd at the Nikon at Jones Beach Theater on Friday night. (Their parents filled most of the rest of the seats.) That is no slight to the group’s music, which is confident, cheerful pop-rock, nor its live show, which is as polished as bands with members twice the brothers’ age and in many ways more enjoyable.

But the Jonas Brothers matter more as social facilitators. For many of their fans, who are old enough to be culturally aware but not old enough to second-guess themselves, the group is their first prominent exposure to celebrity: their gateway band.

Nick, at 15 the youngest, is the auteur, the group’s primary songwriter. Joe, 18, is the heartthrob and stage-show centerpiece. Though at 20 he is the oldest, Kevin is a sort of legacy admission — without the others, where would he even be in a band?

Together they have risen to pop-culture ubiquity with astonishing speed, thanks to a Disney machine — records, television, tours — honed in the Miley Cyrus-Hannah Montana phenomenon and easily retrofittable for new talent. Three years ago the Jonas Brothers opened for the Backstreet Boys at this theater in one of their earliest shows. Now they are among the most culturally important American rock bands of the last decade, reflective of the size and buying power of the children’s market, the mainstreaming of clean Christian values in pop and the evergreen ability of a few handsome kids with reedy voices to captivate all girls within eye- and earshot.

Photo

Joe Jonas performing at the Nikon at Jones Beach Theater.Credit
Christian Hansen for The New York Times

Their 90-minute set, which covered most of the coming album and significant parts of their self-titled second album from last year, left little room to breathe. Predictably, their best-known songs — “Hold On,” “Year 3000,” “Goodnight and Goodbye” — were greeted with mayhem. It continued largely unabated through the encores, despite the fact that parents had been carrying out fatigued children for at least a half-hour.

Two excellent songs from the Disney Channel movie “Camp Rock,” “Gotta Find You” and “This Is Me,” were performed acoustic, at the end of a runway that jutted into the crowd, leaving the band literally surrounded by their fans.

Though he rarely took center stage, this was Nick’s show. He played guitar, drums and piano, and though he lacks Joe’s shamelessness as a performer, he isn’t scared of a little treacle. He wrote the new album’s title track about learning, in 2005, that he had Type I diabetes, and midshow he delivered a homily on the subject from behind a white piano.

The song itself, which Nick sang unaccompanied, revealed his voice’s limits and was one of the night’s few bumps. A couple of new songs, particularly “Can’t Have You,” also fell flat, as did an inexplicable cover of Shania Twain’s “I’m Gonna Getcha Good.”

But “Burnin’ Up,” for which this tour was named, was a colossal crowd-pleaser. And even though “A Little Bit Longer” is slightly less consistent than the band’s last album, the songs the brothers played here suggested they are capable of new tricks. “Pushin’ Me Away” was driving electro-rock; Joe closed out “BBGood” with an unexpected primal howl; and the lilting “Lovebug” — “Beautiful but you don’t even try/Modesty is just so hard to find” — suggests the band has spent at least a little time in the past year listening to the Beatles.

Hints of what’s to come, perhaps, but as the band and its listeners age, can their relationship last? The brothers already have more advanced taste than their fans; during a pair of interludes their backing band played segments from the White Stripes’s “Seven Nation Army” and Usher’s “Love in This Club.” And in the past year they’ve become true dandies — impeccably tight suits, shoes with slight heels, a lot of vests. Here Joe was sporting just the faintest suggestion of a mustache, carefully trimmed.

It was as close as this show got to an exposed seam, a rupture in their perfectly orchestrated presentation, and it only hinted at the choices ahead: Abercrombie & Fitch or Marc Jacobs? “Hannah Montana” or “Gossip Girl”? J-14 or Details? “TRL” or “TMZ”?

The Jonas Brothers will play Madison Square Garden on Monday. The show is sold out.

A version of this review appears in print on , on page E3 of the New York edition with the headline: Cue the Shrieking Girls For Band of Their Moment. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe